I was doing some research into then MAXSpline shaft and I want to know how your team uses it (if your team uses it), just to see if we can use it next build season.
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We really liked using it as the pivot point for our arm this year. It’s also fairly easy to put on/adapt an encoder to it, especially the rev through bore encoder. It’s also incredibly durable (much more than hex shaft) and we noticed that if it breaks, it tend to sort of chip more than actually breaking the entire shaft.
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We did the same and made a custom delrin bushing so it spins nicely. We routered out maxspline shapes in our arm so it was keyed and attached an encoder using the hex adapter for maxspline
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So I am confused how you got the shaft to spin, did you have to make something custom, or is there something you can purchase that makes this easier. I have been looking at cad models of the shaft and I cant find much without needing an adapter to hex shaft.
Is this the only way you can get it to spin nicely? without needing an adapter to have a hex bearing.
custom printed bushings and giant bearings were super helpful for this
For our 4-bar, we transferred the torque using the max spline to have the mechanism be as thin as possible. This also allowed us to use a 1/2 rounded hex as a levered dead-axle, lightening the entire assembly. The max-spline lengths were only .453 in. We used a 3d-printed bushing between the hex and the maxspline
Other teams had interesting uses. 27 used it as their arm.
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This document might spark some inspiration on how to use it. But remember that the max spline is meant to make your life easier, not harder.
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Yeah the bushing makes it spin real nice. Idk if i would trust the dead axle with that much load
Triple Helix’s 2023 robot used MAXSpline in two joints of our 3-jointed arm, to synchronize the two sides of the mechanism.
A slide about how our lower arm joint works:
A previous writeup about how MAXSpline was used in the next arm joint:
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We used it with their dead axle configuration, and it worked really nicely. One of their sprockets on the MAXSpline, bolted to each side of the arm going down to the motor. The spline kept the two bars of the arm aligned and we never had to worry about twisting the shaft.
You can use maxspline as a live axle with 35mm ID bearings. We used these:
If we did it again, i’d 3D print some kind of splined insert or use wider bearings because they tended to deform the shaft under heavy loads, making the joint a little sloppy over time.
These plain bearings would also work:
I would love to see more what you saw for deformation! Would an insert inside of the MaxSpline prevent what you saw?
Our loads were placed a long way from the bearing, so we were asking more from this shaft than was reasonable. It held up pretty well considering.
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Thriftybot has radial and flanged versions of these bearings in stock now
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